If I've understood your "Integrated Tests are a Scam" talk correctly, there would be a collaboration test between the Atom Plugin you are building (or something within the plugin who is the client) and the `word count` collaborator. In this case, how did you verify that the client was respecting the contract? i.e. that the client called `countWords` with an arity of one and not some other method with a different signature.
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I didn't write collaboration tests between Atom and my plugin, because I don't control instantiating parts of Atom, and Atom doesn't appear designed to make that easy. From what I can tell, I simply export an object that has functions activate(state) and deactivate(). I have no earthly idea how Atom invokes them, and I haven't yet had the energy to find out. Instead, I did the next best thing: I started with logging statements and manual tests to gain enough confidence in my understanding of the contract between Atom and my entry point. console.log() ain't pretty, but I found it effective in this case.
Same for registering commands in Atom. I first registered a command with a handler that sent "Hello" to the console. Once I saw that that worked, I felt confident in using any 0-argument function there. Not great, but since I'm not contributing to Atom core, I decided that that would do.
I do this dance with every framework: figure out the minimum I need to know with manual tests, then get to test-driving something as soon as I can. In this case, I found the contract between Atom and the entry point so simple that I didn't feel the need to do anything more complicated than that. I hope that doesn't backfire on me.
In this case, I test-drove from the bottom up towards the entry point. I have a View that verifies that that the Atom command triggers my plugin to "toggle". jQuery already knows how to toggle, so that's easy.
To answer your question at the end, I have a collaboration test showing that my Model uses countWords() correctly. I'm missing tests for my View's updateStats() function. By that point I wasn't in the mood to figure out how to write good collaboration tests with Atom and jQuery. If I have to enhance the plugin, then I'll spend more time to figure that out.
You can look through the rest of the specs here: https://github.com/jbrains/...